


The Bond Metas

by PrettyArbitrary



Series: PA's Metas [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Analysis, Character Analysis, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2014-03-16
Packaged: 2019-09-14 15:48:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16915758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: A collection of my metas on James Bond, mostly re: the Danial Craig movies.





	1. The Inner Life of James Bond

**Author's Note:**

> Moved over here from Tumblr for safekeeping.

  
[The Atlantic, Oct 2013: The Inner Life of James Bond](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-inner-life-of-james-bond/309457/)

> “The latest film, _Skyfall_ , took us deeper into Bond than any of the previous ones, to the very brink of identifiable psychology. The death of the mother figure in the remote chapel, the plunge through the ice, the resurrection motifs: we seemed at moments to be entering the phantasmagoria of the Bond title sequences themselves, those underworld (undersea, sometimes) montages of flames and bullets and writhing women, occasionally churned by shock waves of Shirley Bassey.  
> 
> 
> "Fleming’s novels, too, skirt the droning vacuum of Bond’s inner life.”

  


Hahahahah, not to mention the SCREAMING VAGINA IMAGERY in those underwater images.

I disagree with this article, though.  The idea of the traditional depiction of Bond as being without psychology?  In the movies, yes.  In the movies, he is the apotheosis of our society’s conception of malehood.  The movies’ James Bond is everything men are told they should want and be.  He’s a hedonist, a sophisticate, a thug, a killer, who nonetheless kills only those who warrant it (but you can tell who those are because Bond has killed them), a rapist who doesn’t need to rape because women shower their consent on him like a ticker tape parade.

But that is not who he is in the books.  He’s shallow, yes, but that’s not without critical judgement from the author.  Fleming never presents Bond as if it’s a _good_ thing that he can do all this so easily and that he almost never thinks about it much.  Fleming worked with people like Bond; he knew the toll it took on a human psyche to be that person (if they weren’t psychopaths to begin with), and he explicitly stated more than once that Bond was an amalgamation of men he had known in service (Fleming’s commentary on his own character makes for interesting reading, by the way; it’s an insight on how such a character is developed, and also an intimate glimpse into a morally ambiguous world; and the think the writer of that article erred in going too far back and assuming that Fleming’s most formative years re: Bond happened in his youth).

And when he wrote Bond, there was always a sense of something not being right with the man.  Absolutely, he presented Bond’s attitude and lifestyle as seductive and sexy, but I think where people get confused is that they mistake attractive for being the same as  _admirable_.  It isn’t, and Fleming never pretended it was.  I always walked away from the Bond novels with an abiding sense of the isolation of Bond’s chosen way of life, the emotional hollowness he had worked himself into and then filled with sensual vices, and pity for a man empty enough that he could enjoy living that way.

This is also the Bond of the Daniel Craig movies…and I find it interesting how the character has come around again.  From the 1960s onward, the movie Bond became the perfect glossy action hero.  Uncritical, surrounded by a positive miasma of male machismo and offhanded misogyny.  Yet at the same time, the Bond of the books was very much part of a cultural dialogue, with the plots carrying a constant, evolving undercurrent of commentary on the political state of the world and Britain’s place in it.  M’s reading of Tennyson at her inquest, for example, is not just some post-post-modern hipster commentary on the relevance of the Bond franchise; it’s entirely in line with Fleming’s thoughts on the UK’s post-war struggles to remain relevant as a world power.  Neither the world as it was presented in those books, nor Bond himself, was ever anything except sordid (another influence, obvious once it’s mentioned, was the hard-boiled detective stories of Hammett and Chandler).  And it’s just funny to me how, in due time, Bond has come around to his roots again in popular culture.


	2. The Inner Life of James Bond

When I was four, my mom took my sister and me and walked out on my dad. Until I was in my mid-20s, that old house stood unchanged, except for increasing layers of dust and mildew and sun-fading. I could go back and visit, and my old room was just the same. The bookshelves were the same. The bathrooms were the same, slowly gathering cobwebs and rust and looking as if my dad never even used them. Family photos were left to lie, slowly washing out till they were brassy photo-negatives of themselves.

Dad stopped even actually living there after his parents died and he moved into their house, but still it all just sat there. I remember so much of my early life in that house, and it was…like the post-apocalyptic remains of my life as it might’ve been. When I went there, it was almost like I pretended to be the ghost. 

When we finally sold it–I was 26–it was both weirdly traumatic and freeing. Like an exorcism, or a rebirth.

So I get on a weirdly visceral level what Skyfall is to Bond. It’s the place and time in his life before he was who he is now. He’s CHOSEN to be who he is; he doesn’t want that other life. Whether it was traumatic, or the ending of it was traumatic, or he detests baggage or just feels self-conscious about having been a soft little child (self-consciousness might be the worst thing he could possibly imagine), he’s done his level best to erase that remnant of the old him from his history.

When he goes back there, he’s a different person. Lots of people have remarked how it ‘didn’t feel like Bond.’ Because he isn’t. There, he’s the ghost of a person who never quite existed. The fact that he even showed it to M at all kind of knocked my socks off; I would never have taken anybody but my closest, most trusted friends back to Dad’s old house, because there’s a creepy vulnerability to letting someone walk through a place like that, like you’re letting them into your head. But I think that just saying, 'He trusts M’ would really be over-simplifying. He trusts that they share goals, but he’s also well-aware that she’ll ruthlessly exploit anything she’s given to get what she wants. But Bond’s a bit of a masochist (and a bit of a sadist, too, when he gets going). He likes it when desperation forces him off the map. And, frankly, it’s one place he didn’t mind getting riddled with bullet holes.

But I’m starting to get off-track. The point is, as far as Bond’s concerned, I’m pretty sure Skyfall getting wiped off the planet is one of the best things that could ever happen to him. Because that ghost of his old life that haunted him? It’s gone. Before, someone could conceivably go there. See who he was. Walk away with an awareness of him that’d be beyond his control to stamp out. But now it’s only in his head, where he can seal off that door so no one ever goes in there again. That last piece of youth and vulnerability is gone. Now it’s like he sprang full-formed out of a gun barrel to assassinate for Queen and country.

And at the end, that’s what we see. Just before that cut, we have Bond at his most agonizingly human–which is barely recognizable as James Bond at all. That’s…some other guy, also played by Daniel Craig. And after, when that last persistent fragment of his past is dead, along with his house and the woman who made him what he is, we have a cold predator in a bespoke suit. He’s closer to a machine than human, and then we know him instantly. "At the end,“ we say, "it’s like he’d finally become James Bond.”


	3. Killing as a Career

[intellectualfangirl](http://intellectualfangirl.tumblr.com/post/79732048472/prettyarbitrary-violethuntress):

> Actually, I think this also begs the question of if all professional assassins are inherently bad people. After all, isn’t Bond a professional assassin? Is he a bad person?

Oh my god, yes.  Bond is such a terrible person.  I mean look at him.  He has just about every vice in the book, terrible impulse control when it comes to his personal life, he’s a misogynist (yeah, he’s good with Moneypenny, but the mark of a misogynist is not in the exceptions to the way he treats most women), he’s got a warped sense of the value of life in general, including his own.  He has contempt for his own chain of command and yet he still follows it.  Those are just the things I remember off the top of my head.

He’s a great example, really, of how a story biases us in favor of the main character.  Despite all that being demonstratively true, we find it in ourselves to like him because we’re shown his inner struggles and how he comes to the decisions and behaviors he does.  But the truth is, just because we understand and can sympathize doesn’t necessarily justify him making those choices.

I don’t know that Bond started out as fucked up as he is when we meet him.  But truly, truly, killing people for a living–because it’s your job, because someone else told you to, maybe because you’re paid to do so–it does things to you.  It does things even to soldiers, who are indoctrinated with the moral justifications of killing to defend their country, themselves and their allies, and are (at least theoretically) killing people who are trying to kill them back.

Check out the the literature; for most people, repeated killing creates lasting feelings of guilt, sometimes even PTSD.  It can warp and devalue your sense of the value of life and lead you to a dehumanized view of others.  In the long term, a lot of these people who do jobs like Bond does for a living, it hollows them out.  They go numb, emotionally, stop connecting and empathizing with people, almost like it turns them into psychopaths.  The way Bond is portrayed in the new set of movies is pretty well in-line, really.

Ian Fleming even talked about this himself, a couple of times: that Bond is based on people he knew who worked in Intelligence, and what they were like, and how stone-cold and frankly unpleasant the job tended to make them.  Bond has a congenial demeanor when he wants it, and he’s not out of control (usually).  But you can also  _feel_ him hollowing out, detaching and caring less and less as he goes through the story.

There might, in reality, be nice professional assassins.  But just consider what you would have to do to your own head in order to justify to yourself the habitual killing–not just one, but over and over and over again–of people you don’t really personally know and have nothing personal against.  Anyone who came to the job not already a psychopath would have had to do the same thing.


End file.
